Insights on the Next Generation WLAN: High Experiences (HEX)

TL;DR

This paper highlights that poor quality of experience (QoE) is the main challenge in current WLANs and proposes focusing on high experiences (HEX) as the key goal for future WLAN development.

Contribution

It is the first to identify poor QoE as the primary issue in WLANs and systematically analyze the technical problems causing it, advocating HEX as the next-generation goal.

Findings

Identifies key technical problems affecting QoE in WLANs.

Proposes HEX as the main objective for future WLAN development.

First systematic analysis linking QoE issues to WLAN technical challenges.

Abstract

Wireless local area network (WLAN) witnesses a very fast growth in the past 20 years by taking the maximum throughput as the key technical objective. However, the quality of experience (QoE) is the most important concern of wireless network users. In this article, we point out that poor QoE is the most challenging problem of the current WLAN, and further analyze the key technical problems that cause the poor QoE of WLAN, including fully distributed networking architecture, chaotic random access, awkward ``high capability'', coarse-grained QoS architecture, ubiquitous and complicated interference, ``no place'' for artificial intelligence (AI), and heavy burden of standard evolving. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to point out that poor QoE is the most challenging problem of the current WLAN, and the first work to systematically analyze the technical problems that cause the poor QoE of WLAN. We highly suggest that achieving high experiences (HEX) be the key objective of the next generation WLAN.